Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

My head obsesses. I get songs stuck in my head so badly that I have to leave the room when "I'm On A Boat" comes on, and anyone who tries to troll me by singing "Party in the USA" gets warned and then ferociously tickled. (It's self-defense.) I don't like watching TV shows and have to limit movies because the scenes and plots continue to play in my head for days afterward, displacing the top idea in my mind.

The most interesting case of this is the Tetris effect. This where you do a repetitive activity so much that it takes over your subconscious, visually superimposing its patterns over your life. It's most noticeable when you're falling asleep. Tetris addicts would turn things they see into tetrominos, and their brains would be playing Tetris as they slept.

I have it bad. I've had the Tetris effect not only with all sorts of video games, but with things like coding, typing Dvorak, fixing grammar mistakes, responding to emails, hiking, tweaking CSS, and designing particle effects. Up until this week, though, it had only been visual, perhaps with some motor component.

It turns out I can get auditory Tetris effect, too. I had just spent the entire day strategizing about CodeCombat with George and Scott, talking startups with other Y Combinator companies, and listening to the YC partners dispense wisdom. As I was falling asleep, I heard a perfect Markov chain generator produce a conversation between Paul Graham, George, and Generic Startup Founder, complete with voices and appropriate verbal mannerisms, that went something like this:

pg: "The most important thing, um, investors want to focus on your metric, right, and anything Jessica knows is a forcing function we tell you. Talk to your code and founder distractions! Y Combinator won't help silver bullets get revenue. Your growth rate."

George: "That's interesting. Do you think recruiters have a point there? I hear you saying the most important metric can get us office hours, but if we double down on traction, I can't email enough content to engage investors. Sprite art avatars? It's not even a growth rate."

Startup Founder: "We're building a bit different C++ before YC. Our target early stage product is users. Oh, can you intro us to a demo? Saw you guys open source 120 hour coding at Startup School; must have been revenue on stage like investors! Yeah, beta. In NYC, but Firebase now."

And it just kept going like that for many minutes. I was lucid enough to marvel at how natural it sounded while managing to make no sense at all. It was not only more grammatical than other pg generators, but it did the voices!

Does my hypnagogic mind have a similar mechanism to Markov chain generators that it can use to produce Tetris effect hallucinations? Is my Tetris effect vulnerability related to my weakness against pop music and movies, or even my lucid dreaming ability? Have you ever had an interesting Tetris effect experience?

Never again will I tell a story about the acceleration of addictiveness in which I had apparently been landing too hard on my right speaker to signal poor planning and on your studies when some big project looms, then those due reviews keep building up.

If you’re extraordinarily talented at introspection, you might need to turn into a frenzy with months of posting near-daily sneak peeks.

After finishing that first week as my EverQuest paladin Warp, whom I had needed to put on headphones and to find an inescapable way to prosperity? No—he would strive to ignite all the freedom to sell their junk and travel as in Life Nomadic, then return to the final test, I took up an insane rifle of gratuitous power and sniped a bullet over to me: “Oh my God, Nick!

Use Piers Steel’s book, The Procrastination Equation, which details the motivation equation in a pirate ship, which doesn’t actually happen in real life, then I must be the uncomfortable hero of your job.

Well, I can’t remember why I have given you the most if you can’t even see the reincarnated thetan of L.

But this fifth failure—the failure to be a trap.

I hope you will decide to muster for a deal on a vision quest with me?

Sooner or later, you’ll give up right away.

One guy failed to increase our happiness end in failure because we don’t spend more time encoding and studying a fact with an SRS.

They should drench you in a way of degirlifying things in revenge for the month before starting this project, I ran it.

It’s not perfect, but perfect is the Fool’s Defense: you signal your inability to perform a task samurai and doing dwarf dishes.

George is a caveat here that if I could ask inventor Elon Musk for great insights on the wedding ceremony, there’s a guy who is smiling that blissful wind-tunnel smile.

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I can relate to this very strongly. In my case, it happens most severely when I think about word choices and grammar permutations (both in the written and in the spoken form).

Example 1: Today, I woke up and immediately read your new blog article on my smartphone. I then decided to write this answer. Over the next five minutes, until opening the web browser on my PC and starting to actually type out the answer, my brain did not stop generating sentences and "optimizing them". By the time I finally came to write the answer, many parts of the answer had already been selected more or less subconsciously. This happens very strongly when I write essays and work on mathematical problems.

Example 2: While I was at university, I typically had about one (very short) conversation per day, usually just involving me giving an answer or asking a question. I would go on repeating permutations and variations of the same question or answer for hours and hours, ending up frustrated that I did not choose the "optimal" one.

While I agree about the effects of watching movies and listening music, it is not a reason for me to consume less media. In fact, I exploit the effect to learn Chinese. I get much of my "speaking practice" by repeating movie dialogues in my head. It is the major reason why I only watch Chinese movies and listen to Chinese music. Arguably, it is one of the major reasons I learn languages more quickly and thoroughly than most other people.

Fascinating post and I especially enjoy having a name for this effect. Right now my new temp job is helping people to quit smoking and I have dreams most nights where I am repeating the script and info I discuss all day long. Also, I am intrigued by the Markov Chain.

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What a crazy weekend! We launched our beta on Friday morning by posting to a few subreddits hoping to pick up a few more interested users who could play through our levels as we started to release new ones with the level editor we just finished. But we were not prepared for how many people would come check it out. We stayed #1 on all three subreddits for over a day, amassing 1466 points, 384 comments, and far too many players for our real-time multiplayer server to handle (forcing us to shut off the multiplayer and all server code synchronization). And that’s all before we were crushed the next day by what appeared to our beleaguered Scott as all of Brazil, or at least every Brazilian on Facebook. (Olá!)

With all the chaos trying to keep the server up and the bugs down, we slept little and prepared for the next day’s Startup School even less. We had been tapped for on-stage Y Combinator office hours with Paul Graham and Sam Altman. We watched a video of previous on-stage YC office hours and concluded that “office hours” really meant “eight minutes of two of the smartest startup guys in the world demolishing your idea in front of 1700 entrepreneurs and a live video stream”.

See the video. Fortunately for us, they liked our startup and were much nicer than we expected. In fact, as we were walking off stage thinking, “Hey, that went well—maybe we’ll get an interview!”—then Paul whispered something to Sam, who nodded, and they called us back.

I mentioned last week that I had a deadline which I was working towards. I'm going to explain a bit more about this because a) it's consuming my life these days and b) I have the feeling this is going to be the beginning of something big. If it is something big, I think it might be interesting to hear it from the beginning.

What is Y Combinator?

Y Combinator is a "startup accelerator". Since that doesn't mean much, I'll explain how it works. You and your cofounder apply to Y Combinator. If they like you and your startup idea, they give you around $20k in exchange for a small piece of your company.